Lone Star

by Mathilde Walter Clark

  if they swim, they swim. The sentence pops into my head when I think about what became clear with Jessica and, later, Eugene. She was kicked out of one school, then another, before her condition was given a name. That Jessica was different, or, when things really came to a boil, what to myself I referred to as behaviorally difficult, such as when we were headed out the door to some formal event and she would start screeching so the entire house shook, or when she didn’t like people looking at her, or when she grew angry and mixed up her letters and shouted hwat?—all had a clinical term: autism.

  It didn’t involve superhuman talents, as you might think from watching Rain Man, in which Tom Cruise’s autistic big brother, played by Dustin Hoffman, went to the casino and won a fortune in blackjack by counting cards or by declaring how many matches fell out of the box.

  It didn’t involve any of these things. My dad said it was if she heard eight hundred radio programs all at once. Which meant she had a harder time learning than the rest of us, and she liked patterns, set routines, rituals. Which meant that she commenced watching tv in the big bedroom every night by rolling herself up in their bedspread. She laid on the floor at the foot of the bed, wrapped and mummified inside the cover, until she fell asleep. If anyone tried to break this routine and pull her from the bedspread, she’d have one of her famous meltdowns that used to occur only when something deviated significantly from her school-supermarket-tv-watching routine. At midnight she rolled out of the synthetic blanket, stood abruptly, and went up to her room, where she continued praying in an angst-ridden, ritualistic way.

  In school she took her fits out on other children. After attempting ordinary schools, she was enrolled in a special school for autistic children. It was far away, and there was only one other student who could speak. I pictured her as one of two awake children in a sleeping hall. hwat! There was no future for her there. Soon they recognized this, and she was transferred to a new school, which she was kicked out of. Finding alternatives became increasingly difficult. I heard about it through my dad’s letters. You went to public schools at your own peril, he believed, the teachers even felt obligated to carry guns, and the private schools that weren’t too expensive didn’t want her. They finally succeeded in getting her into a new school. My dad helped her with her homework several hours each night. She was no longer rolling herself up in the bedspread.

  One year later it was Eugene. He began to bite the other children at school. A new chain of school shifts began. Later, when he was around eighteen, his condition got a name too, a clinical term: schizophrenia. Long periods of time passed searching for the right medicine. There were episodes so terrible that they didn’t have a name. My only access to what was happening to my brother was through my dad’s letters. His vagueness on details formed another door between me and what was going on. I don’t know if my dad was also standing outside that door, or if it was just me, the letters expanded the distance between us. I was standing at the far end of a bucket brigade, and far away, deep inside behind a long row of doors, sat my brother. That was how I imagined him, Eugene, seated on the edge of a bed, and right outside, behind a door, my dad stood, unable to open it. If I’d appeared and offered my hand, would he have leapt into it? Or was he somewhere beyond reach?

  •

  I think of the Clark children, the motley group of siblings who ate their lunches together in the cafeteria at Captain’s Kids. Of the times I’d been the one to fill the plastic cups to the lines with soda. Of the soda bottle that had bound us together at the same table instead of with our classmates. And I, their summer vacation big sister who wasn’t there most of the time. After the age of eleven, Jessica didn’t sit there either and, over time, Eugene became absent as well.

  And there were more.

  We were far from the only ones absent at that table.

  ◊

  A month has passed since my dad suggested Uncle Faz. Today I’ve gotten his number. My dad has also thought of another. Marcel, he writes, I’m asking Marcel (who is responsible and whom I can trust) to inform you immediately if something happens to me. He believes that Marcel, given his own ‘special situation,’ would have a particular understanding of mine.

  Marcel. I saw a photograph of him that my dad sent at Christmas last year. At first I wasn’t certain that it was Marcel. An old man glowering across a dinner table, a slightly dispirited expression on his face. His curls were gone, and the spare, steel-gray hair that had replaced it was scraped back over his dome. The strong body I remember was collapsed into a potbelly, in the picture his entire face seemed to have collapsed, in fact. Light-blue shirt, hands in his lap, Sabrina beside him, her mouth full of food. You could see a glimpse of Eugene’s neck. A shadow of a fourth person, maybe Sabrina’s husband.

  There was an empty chair between Marcel and the others. Again, the empty chair. And on the plates: empty shells of baked potatoes, potato skins like tiny faces someone had left behind.

  •

  I don’t recall which of the summers it was, maybe the second or the third, or maybe it was in the very first. In any case, he showed up, a boy with a wide nose and dense, curly, ash-colored hair. Marcel. I tried his name in my mouth, Marcel, Marcel, Marcelle, it sounded French, but I’d been told that he came from Germany. He was my siblings’ half-brother, just as I was their half-sister. He was their mother’s boy, her first son, she’d had him in Germany with the man she’d been married to before my dad.

  He was a little older than me and had a body that looked as if it was constructed of a more solid material than ours. Everything about him was broad and strong. His mouth, nose, eyes, hands.

  He appeared and disappeared again. I don’t remember a single situation with him, not a single conversation. Only his heavy, brooding presence and the fact that he was just there, silent and practical, like a hat you put on because it shades the sun.

  Where did he go when he was not there? Not to Germany—he had no contact with his dad—but to boarding school. He circled out of our line of vision, just as I must have done, a distant moon. Only when my mother called did his name come up. I got the feeling that Marcel was a figure on a board game with equal value as me. My mother ought not to call me, because as Marcel’s mom said: She didn’t call Marcel! She pointed out the irony of my living with them, since she had sent Marcel away to boarding school. The only way I understood it, Marcel and I formed a threat to the balance in the house, and that I with my presence, and Marcel with his lack of the same, were disturbing this balance, and it was exacerbated whenever my mother called me. She viewed my mother’s phone calls as a lack of self-restraint, a form of greediness (she didn’t call Marcel!). It was complicated, maybe even insane, but whenever my mother called me, Marcel suffered indirectly.

  •

  The last time I saw Marcel was the Christmas that we all sat around the big table in the dining room. Or not all of us: Someone was always missing at that table, there wasn’t a single time we were fully present, but that Christmas we came closer than ever.

  I hadn’t visited in several summers, and I was gradually beginning to rule out my becoming part of the house again. I was eighteen and halfway through my senior year, and soon I would move away from home, but in the beginning of December my dad sent me a letter with possible dates, and in the next letter a ticket.

  Marcel lived at the house, in the basement, and must have been a student somewhere. My cousin, Little Chan, whom I’d seen only in photos, had moved to St. Louis, where he’d taken a job as a display artist in a high-end department store. In my imagination I’ve also put Peggy, Big Chan (whom I still hadn’t met), and Gussie at the table. They had all flown from Texas to celebrate Christmas with us. The Christmas tree is in the hall, extending two stories up, so high that you have to stand on the second floor to place the star. Peggy and Gussie have roasted the turkey. My imagination doesn’t allow me to see my dad as the one slicing the turkey. I don’t think he would know how to cut it. So, he sits like the rest of us, with no und
erstanding that he is expected to do something, slowly turning his beer bottle on the table, clearing his throat until someone in the group stands. In the photo I have seen of Little Chan, he was kneeling on a lawn, resting an oblong brown ball against one thigh, dressed in the padded uniforms American football players wear. In reality he’s heavier, so heavy that that he can no longer pass as muscular, but he has the same blue eyes and mild features—and what I wasn’t able to read from photos: a high-pitched voice and a heavy-set girlfriend by the name of Mimi. Maybe he’s the one who stands up, or maybe Marcel, but most likely it’s Big Chan, who sets his cowboy hat on one of the empty chairs next to the wall. In Texas, people know how to carve up a bird. His face is round, red with sun and whiskey, he picks up the carving set and with long, grinding motions begins to sharpen the knife as if he were playing a violin. My eyes turn to Marcel. Then the meat is divvied up on our plates, and we dress it with sauce and prunes and boiled, glazed potatoes and cranberries that Peggy and Gussie spent the day preparing in the kitchen. We eat. We sit around the table.

  Peggy is still there.

  Little Chan is still there.

  My grandmother is still there.

  I’m there. Marcel is there.

  We are all there together.

  Marcel was practical. He wanted to be an airplane mechanic. His hands seemed broad and friendly. Everything about him seemed broad and friendly, his mouth, nose, eyes, shoulders, even his teeth were broad, nearly square, like the squares on a graph-ruled notebook. My siblings were always on the verge of hysteria, but not Marcel; he was nothing like the others. I couldn’t help but visit him in the basement. There he sat at a table tinkering with something under a bright light, a stereo system with an open belly and its dull metal insides showing. I wondered what his dad looked like, if he was as broad and friendly? If he also had a broad, slightly shiny nose and calm hands that could pry things apart and put them back together again, make them work?

  Marcel and I sat in my room right before or right after dinner. We sat talking, I don’t remember what we talked about, but I would be lying if I said there was no tension in the air, the kind generated when two young people sit alone in a room talking. But I would also be lying if I said that there was. Everything around us was open, I almost want to say: innocent.

  Either way, it was good to talk to Marcel, much better than talking to my siblings, who suddenly seemed small and childish to me. Everything trembled. Then the door crashes open, and the doorknob slams against the wall with a bang, and my dad appears in the doorway. He says something, he sounds angry, I have to concentrate to understand what he says. He says that it’s not a good idea for the two of us to be sitting here talking, Marcel and I, two young people who, thanks to their parents’ actions, randomly find themselves in the same house. And behind a closed door. It’s just not a good idea. He says: It’s not appropriate. Two young people sitting and talking in a room. Marcel stood at once. I looked at him, and it was like his face had collapsed, he didn’t look at me but at the floor, smoothing his no doubt moist hands against his thighs, and he was still staring at the floor when he passed my dad in the doorway. And then he was gone, on his way to the basement on perfectly soundless steps.

  My dad was still standing in the doorway, his hand connected to the doorknob with a long, curved arm that just hung there like a garland. The man I was accustomed to entering through doors with, the man I was accustomed to seeing along with, now stood on the threshold looking into the room, looking at me with a strange expression. I didn’t recognize myself in that expression. I didn’t recognize Marcel, and I especially didn’t recognize him, an American dad, a type, someone who hung about in doorways, tormented by thoughts of all the unhealthy activities that surely happened behind them.

  He entered my room and sat down beside me, and he tried to explain to me what was bad about the bad idea. The words flapped around in my head, English, Danish, but I didn’t have the energy to capture any of them, suddenly didn’t have the energy to go out of my way to find the right one, to bring them within reach, organize them, introduce them, the English, for my dad. I just sat there burning with shame over the images his imagination had now put in my head.

  After that, I couldn’t look at Marcel without seeing him stand, red-faced, and exit my room with stiff strides. So, I didn’t look at him. He didn’t look at me, either. The house was big enough, he lived in the basement, I was on the top floor, and there were still two stairwells.

  I’ve not had an actual conversation with him ever since. But now he’s the one I can expect to hear from if something happens to my dad. He who understands my ‘special situation,’ and he whom my dad describes as the most reliable. As a friend, a priest, once told me: God’s irony is infinite.

  i can’t help but think about that image, the Christmas photo with the middle-aged man who is supposed to be Marcel now. And I can’t help but think about the empty chair between him and Sabrina. Apparently it belongs to no one, the photographer (whoever it is) is sitting on the other side of the table. It’s just there, plateless. As if a place had been set for a not-especially-hungry ghost.

  When I look at that chair, I can’t help but think of Marcel’s brother, André.

  I can’t help but think about how little it takes for someone to fall out of a family album …

  ◊

  My siblings are all younger than me. And yet, my dad has known their mother much longer than he’s known mine. Five and a half years longer, to be exact. It was his second year at Princeton, and he’d rented a small house near where George Washington had crossed the Delaware during the American Revolution. He’s always liked George Washington, and he also liked the house, where he threw many parties. People heard about them, and strangers always turned up. That was the case with the woman who would one day become my siblings’ mother, who was twenty years old at the time, an au pair. She arrived in the same car as her host family, and when the party was nearly over, she told my dad she was afraid the car was running out of gas. My dad had promised to drive his best friend’s girlfriend home (the friend had just taken a new job in Houston), and on the way he bought some gas for the Dutch au pair. A few weeks later, she decided to head west to Denver with him, where he’d landed a summer job as a rocket scientist at the Martin Aircraft Company.

  They were together for six months in Denver. Most of the time she suffered from anorexia. The relationship ended when they returned to Princeton. My dad continued on to his next post-doc, at nato, first in Birmingham, England, and then in Saclay, south of Paris. The woman who would become my siblings’ mother stayed another year in the Princeton area, working as an unpaid intern in New York City’s fashion industry.

  Neither of them wasted any time during the intervening years. While my dad was in Birmingham, he met a German woman, Brigitte, and they married in October 1962. He still exchanged letters, now and then, with the woman who would become my siblings’ mother. She’d returned to her mother and four sisters in Eindhoven. She was the eldest of the five girls, and she idolized her father, a charming and gifted man, a novelist, journalist, political commentator, and good friend of folks like Bertolt Brecht and Willy Brandt. During the Second World War he’d led an espionage ring for the British in Berlin and had recently returned to that city after serving five years as a political prisoner in East Germany. She left her mother and sisters in the Netherlands and moved to Berlin to be with her dad, and there she met a German man whom she married, the heir of a large family- owned publisher. They had two sons, first Marcel and then, around two years later, André.

  On a parallel track, my dad met my mother and divorced the German woman. My parents married, had a child, and divorced, and my mother returned to Denmark with as much as could fit in a bag and with me under her arm. The woman who would become my siblings’ mother also divorced her German spouse, and she and her husband split the boys between them like beads in a schoolyard. That’s how I’ve always pictured it, one for you and one for me, a boy o
f six and a boy of four and a half. I don’t know when she returned to the U.S. with her half of the sons to start a new family. Maybe they crossed paths in flights across the Atlantic. My mother with her bag and one-year-old me and she with her bag and six-year-old Marcel.

  A number of faceless imaginings persist. How did they decide who would take whom? Was it self-evident and each got their favorite son? Or had they simply drawn lots? Played rock paper scissors? His name sometimes entered my siblings’ play. They could be fussy when we counted our numbers and said: We also have a brother somewhere in Germany. They were four + Marcel + the sister from Denmark + a brother somewhere in Germany. Germany not as a country, a place you could travel to with a passport or send letters to like my dad did with me. Germany was, like their brother, an abstraction.

  Marcel had no contact with his brother or his father, and my siblings’ mother had no contact with her other son. Somewhere in Germany. They could just as easily have said on the moon, on Mars, on Jupiter. Somewhere in Germany was in Never-Neverland. André lived there, a boy without hair color. He had no height, his nose was neither broad nor narrow, and he wasn’t interested in anything, he wasn’t good at sports nor the opposite. André had no characteristics, no substance other than what lay in the two syllables, An-dré, and the cold fumes that trailed in their wake.

  when my stepfather died in the spring, my dad wrote that he would come to Copenhagen during the summer. May came and went, then June and July, and several times I’d asked when he was planning to come. When he writes back, he answers other questions, but not that one. I’m left with the feeling that it’s no oversight. He’s dodging the question. There’s something he’s not telling me.